WWW94: state of the web

presented by joseph hardin, NCSA
first, joseph gave a short overview of
NCSA. the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications at the university of illinois is one of five
civil supercomputer centers in the USA.

scientists came up with a request for a tool that would not only allow to
present data very easily, but they also wanted the possibility to link pieces
of information together or to reference information that already exist.
therefore MOSAIC was developed as a browser for hypertext documents.

with the growth of the web, MOSAIC has become extremely popular. this led to
significant problems on the server at NCSA, because hundreds of users
downline load the MOSAIC software every day. today, they have four servers
that serve the web on a roundrobin basis.

today people at NCSA try to stabilize the MOSAIC software and to make sure
that all the necessary standards are fulfilled.
beside this, they want to include an HTML-editor into MOSAIC. there are also
plans to define APIs which would lead to a "callable" MOSAIC. finally there
is a project at NCSA to provide disabled people access to the web.